meanderings

being kind in an unkind world

... i've had so many things i wanted to blog about... watching my daughter perform after so many years hiatus.... wanting to find words to release my feelings and the editor in me tearing them apart before they could leave my head.. much less make it to paper (or screen).
but today i am hit once again with how much pain we carry around with us and how little we are aware of what people are feeling and experiencing and how harshly we judge others without knowing them or what their lives are like or what demons they are battling...
and into my head pops an image of mason. i just love mason... mason is a drunk and a thief and a grim reaper on dead like me... and he sees people and is kind and thoughtful and loving... and sad
i think he reminds me of myself

... the old and the new...

i got up this morning thinking that i was early enough to make it to church, but i guess my mind doesn't work too well in the mornings because by the time i took a quick shower and put on my clothes, it was too late. so i did what i so often do. i took down one of my notebooks full of roger sermons and sat down to read... about the need to value the old, to sustain the roots in our lives, while embracing the new, those scary things that we've never done before.
i think what i've found is that the older i grow the harder i find it to embrace the new. i don't know that i'm clinging to the old, in many ways, i think i've distanced myself from both... and i'm beginning to see where the root cause is fear, that emotion so entrenched in my mother that has been my lifelong battle.
i feel like i'm suffering from a low grade grief these days like you walk around with a low grade fever. it doesn't really stop you from the everyday stuff of life but makes you feel like you're carrying around a heavy blanket on your shoulders. of course, that's always what depression feels like for me. what varies is the weight of the blanket.
thus today's inventory... what is in that blanket?
my mother and father... watching the process of alzheimer's is not easy.... the loss of dignity, the loss of your history. i think it is worse for my dad... watching the person you loved (and fought with) for almost sixty years dissipate into someone you don't know, who only shines through in glimpses...
the loss of my children... one already a 15 hour drive away, one leaving on a plane for a different continent in less than a month, and one anxiously looking forward to the day when he, like his sisters, can leave his home at 16 to pursue art in a community like no other.... and i would not take their wings away. it has been my life's work to nurture those wings so that they might fly away from me. ... which doesn't really make it easier, it just makes me need more courage...
and then there's the old.... and for me, the old hurts too... the years of feeling so different, of trying to please, of questions i suppressed because no one else seemed to ask them ( i have a sneeking suspicion that maybe they did and suppressed them better than i did) years of stupidity and self destruction than even now can make me cringe, and even the old that was healing and love and bliss does not seem to comfort, because it is over and gone....
i've decided that no one reads this, and therefore i am safe in using it on occasion to do what nancy did for me... just to let me say, or in this case write, and name the things that hurt so that i can move on.
but i better write a lot more before christmas which is the one time my children and a few others do read this
:-)